Mule Days
Humble pack-animals risk everything they have, move at astonishing speeds
Fiddlin’ Pete Plays ’King of the Gypsies’
The drama of mule-packing rests in the psychology of the mule
The discovery of gold in Aurora, Nevada in 1862 brought a flood of miners and adventurers, including a young Mark Twain, to the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Anticipating a demand for beef, cattlemen followed shortly on their heels. Some of these cattlemen made it to Aurora. Others, passing through the adjacent Owens Valley and attracted by its open ranges, decided to settle there instead.
This was just as well, for by 1865 most of the gold in Aurora was gone, and pretty soon the town was in irreversible decline. The population fell from 10,000 to a couple hundred within only a few years. Some people broke down the empty houses and sold the worn bricks to contractors on the coast. Others moved into the Owens Valley, where the cattlemen had established a string of towns running southwards down the corridor between the Sierra and White Mountains. The first of these townships was Bishop, …
The Magic of Castor Oil Packs
‘Palms of Christ’ have healing powers, known to the Pharaohs
Cultivating castor oil consciousness, with the help of medical mystic Edgar Cayce
The real doctor is you
In the bleak end-of-winter days of March 2013, I found myself reporting a story from a barge on the Mississippi River. The barge was parked near President’s Island, a forlorn peninsula in southwest Memphis blighted by chemical plants and agribusiness operations, where great drifts of garbage accumulate after heavy rains. As we bumped along over the filthy water in a speedboat, my guide pointed out an oil refinery here, a cement factory there, a Cargill corn processing facility on that bank, a coal-fired power plant on another. I noticed that my lungs had begun to burn. The air, which smelled of acrid chemicals and fermented cereal grains, was a toxic soup the likes of which I had never encountered or inhaled.
But I wasn’t going to be a baby, so I ignored the searing sensation in my chest. And then, adding insult to injury, a passenger with a respiratory flu joined our group. Armed with my personal travel …
The Snake and the Hawk
Hero Silsbee, Tx. Resident Fights Off Earthly and Heavenly Predators
Peggy Jones, 64, faced with mind-bending paradox of suffering and deliverance, aces test
Was the Lord’s Hand visible?
Faith is powerful!
Seldom has an appeal for heavenly aid been so miraculously answered as it was in the case of Peggy Jones, 64, a resident of Silsbee, Texas, who was riding her tractor one evening in late July when a large snake came tumbling from the sky and attached itself to her arm with cruel intent. The serpent had every advantage in this struggle, as has been true on earth for thousands of years. Four feet in length and possessed of ugly fangs, it coiled itself around Jones’ limb and sprayed what she took to be venom onto her skin.
“Help me, Jesus!” cried Jones from her Kubota tractor. “Help me, Jesus!”
Americans are a self-reliant people, and Texans most of all, perhaps, so even as Jones called out to Our Savior, she also did her part in the desperate fight. Vigorously, she waved her arm about, trying to dislodge the clinging monster. It hissed in her face, defiant. All seemed …
